Vlucht uit Babel: De rol van het Latijn in het 'wereldtaalvraagstuk'

Abstract

In the period from about 1890 to 1960, there was a widespread belief that a universal language would make an important contribution to both material progress and international understanding. Alongside artificial languages such as Esperanto and national languages such as English and French, for a long time Latin also received serious attention as a potential world language of the future. This article provides an analysis of the discussion held in the Netherlands about the pros and cons of Latin as a modern world language. On the one hand, this analysis shows that due to a unique combination of properties, strong arguments could be made in favour of Latin. On the other hand, both its notorious difficulty and the problems raised by attempts at modernising its archaic vocabulary complicated the candidacy of Latin as a future lingua franca. The article concludes that underlying the ultimate failure of Latin as a modern world language was a misguided attempt to reinvent Latin as a ‘living’ language. The paradoxical lesson this failure teaches is that it is not the ‘life’, but precisely the ‘death’ of the Latin language that is able to maintain it for contemporary use.